Cripes, a bumbershoot!
LIONEL SHRIVER
Paperchase caused a kerfuffle in March by marketing British greeting cards printed, "World's Greatest Mom". It was bad enough that Mothering Sunday was morphing ominously into the more commercial "Mother's Day" from across the pond. Now those wretched Americans were attacking the very institution of motherhood itself. "Mom" indeed! The Telegraph's leader despaired, "Hollywood is corrupting the language". Surely the American "slow occupation of British culture" was bound to reach its peak when "football games are rebranded as 'soccer'". The leader called drolly for a tariff on American English as a response to President Trump's tariff on steel.
Yet the online comments section was full of sniffy Birmingham natives who call their mothers "Mom", not "Mum". A letter to the Editor objected that the Telegraph's leader writers "betrayed their youthful age"; in the letter writer's childhood, football was routinely called "soccer", a British term that derives from "association football". On the sidelines, the linguist Lynne Murphy must have been chortling. These excitable exchanges are the meat and potatoes – or mince and mash – of her work.
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Multiple Americans have capitalized on living a spell in Britain by writing lightweight, piecemeal books that explain to an American audience what the British really mean by incessantly saying "sorry". By contrast, Murphy's The Prodigal Tongue is thorough, well researched, and keen on digging down that extra layer where the linguistic bones are buried. Yet to call it "serious" might do the book an injustice, for her delivery is sparkling, her approach mischievous, her material brightened by the unexpected. American by birth, Murphy is a dual citizen, and her audience is clearly more the British than the Yanks. She exhibits a good-humoured impartiality, and, unlike those lightweight predecessors, doesn't aim to flatter.
The Prodigal Tongue takes head-on this supposed American contamination of British English. Murphy's online search for "an ugly Americanism" turned up 7,780 hits; "a lovely Americanism", 227. Citations of "horrible", "vile", "awful" and "dreadful" Americanisms were many times more common than "nice", "useful", "apt" and "delightful" ones. Paranoia about the corruption of the mother tongue – what Murphy calls "amerilexidophobia" – by a relentless assault from Netflix, Hollywood and books with American spelling (indeed, my British publisher no longer bothers to convert "harbor" to "harbour" in text edited in New York) is not constrained to young fogeys at the Telegraph. For a host of British purists, Murphy notes, American English is "an invasive species that will choke and supplant the native wordlife".
Yet many of the usages that the British perceive as American imperialism in fact originated in Britain and merely fell out of favour here, while in America they continued to flourish. The much reviled "gotten" is a British word that Americans revived. The term "quotation mark" originated in Britain, where it only became an "inverted comma" in 1839; after a disagreeable era of the yucky-sounding "speech mark" taught in British schools in the 1970s and 80s, younger Britons who now say "quotation mark" are merely returning to national form. The English invented the word "sidewalk" in the early seventeenth century. In Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, the season when leaves drop off was "fall". More, the default British assumption that every new linguistic trend is necessarily from the United States is often incorrect. BBC listeners who objected to presenters' use of the Americanism "It's a big ask" did not do their homework. The expression hails from Australia.
Americans, too, are prone to assume that quaint, eccentric-sounding words are British coinages. A writer in Slate puzzled over why Americans have adopted "laddish" from the English, but not "bumbershoot". What the hell's a "bumbershoot", you might well wonder. It's early twentieth-century American slang for umbrella. Because it sounds silly, bouncy and cute, Yanks routinely imagine that "poppycock" – Dutch for "doll's poop", brought by settlers from the Netherlands in North America – is an import from those endearingly goofball Brits. Even Urban Dictionary lists the word as "a British term for bullshit".
In the interest of perpetuating the American stereotype of the British as preposterous and euphemistically naughty, when becoming the host of CBS's Late, Late Show James Corden was encouraged to use "charming" British slang like "willy", "bonkers", "shag" and "squiffy". But the producers were anxious that Corden avoid the likes of "knackered", "bladdered", "half-cut", "well-oiled" and "trolleyed", which don't paint a picture quite so adorable.
I can second Murphy's broad assertion that "people are just not very good at knowing what's British and what's American" – for I have a dog in this fight. As an American writer who has lived in the UK for many years, I'm constantly wrangling with my American publisher, whose production department insists on warning every copy-editor assigned to my books that "Shriver's problem is including Britishisms". Accordingly, these copy-editors routinely suffer from what Murphy identifies as "novelty bias" – any usage with which the copy-editors are unfamiliar leaps out at them – as well as "confirmation bias", thanks to their employer's stern instruction.
Thus rather than look up what is to these commonly young freelancers textual exotica, they all instantly assume that any unknown usage is a "Britishism" to be expunged. Because most people are lazy, overconfident and complacent about their own "nationlect", this means I'm the one who spends hours online documenting that "piker" (one who gambles tiny amounts of money; broadly, a small-time amateur) alludes to immigrants to California from Pike County, Missouri, during the nineteenth-century gold rush, and is as American as an assault rifle.
As a consequence of this ethnic cleansing, if you will, my characters are required to speak with a colloquial purity at odds with the messy interaction between the two argots that I observe in real life. For the British fearful of verbal "invasion" correctly observe that the internet, films and especially television have speeded up the rate at which American and British vernaculars miscegenate; they're simply wrong to assume that these cups of linguistic sugar borrowed from the neighbours go all one way. Just as "guy" has gradually penetrated British parlance, "spot on", "knock-on effect", "dodgy", "cheeky", "baby bump" and "one-off", for example, are all popping up in American speech and prose. "At the end of the day" has spread like potato blight on American political talk shows.
Yet appropriations can miss the nuance. In an enthusiastic New York Times book review not long ago, Janet Maslin deemed a novel "twee". In context, she clearly meant the adjective as a compliment. In other instances, Americans launder British expressions to suit their own lingo (creating a "calque" or "loan translation", I now learn). "Don't get your panties in a twist" became all the rage in the US a few years back, and to Americans this tweaked but still shop-worn chastisement was terribly fresh, witty and original. No one appeared to realize that the gist of the injunction was British.
Murphy provides a potpourri of enchanting, counterintuitive surprises. As for spelling – and how passionate some lingual protectionists can grow about the double L in "traveller" – only in the 1990s did the The Times switch to the suffix "–ise" rather than the "–ize" it had preferred for seventy years (the TLS still holds out). She discounts the myth that business jargon is abundantly American; "incentivise" first appeared in the Guardian in 1968, and "action" was first used as a verb in The Times in 1960. Though the British may marginally still embody the quality more than their cousins, "stiff upper lip" is an American coinage. So is "skive", "know your onions" and "a dog's breakfast".
As a linguist, Murphy believes in the free market. She regards the trading of conventions across the Atlantic as mutually enhancing. The English language is famously elastic, and the better for absorbing endless new inventions and imports. American expressions are additions to the British lexicon, and vice versa – not replacements. The language is thriving to such a degree that in future the manner in which we wield it may be heavily influenced by the world's burgeoning number of second-language speakers. As the book's last section heading declares, "English doesn't need saving". English is – an adjective beloved of British politicians – robust.
The Prodigal Tongue is playful, funny, smart and often humbling. The volume reads well for a general readership, yet evidences enough scholarly underpinnings that it must have been a lot of work. Murphy's prose is beguiling, and sprinkled with sprightly quotations from other sources. A lightness of tone – as opposed to a lightweight tone – both leavens the text and conveys a sense of proportion. I once spent the better part of a dinner party arguing over "aluminium" versus "aluminum" (and what American living in London hasn't?), but these faux-ferocious fisticuffs are entertainment. Terrified by threats of environmental, epidemiological and economic disaster after her daughter's birth, Murphy confides, "I do not care whether her generation or the next use the subjunctive, how they spell colo(u)r, or whether they pronounce the r at the end of it". Fair enough. But before the apocalypse, you could do worse than read Lynne Murphy's delightful book.
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